Skill-rich action RPG Last Epoch will finally release in February
The wheels of game development roll on, and action RPG Last Epoch has a release date: February 21, 2024. First released back in 2019, Last Epoch bills itself as an isometric action RPG fan's ARPG, developed by and for people who love a big pile of customizable skills and loot and a horde of baddies to plow through.
The 1.0 release will be considered the complete game, with the Warlock and Falconer classes forthcoming. It will also include two Item Factions, a system designed to let players choose between collecting loot themselves or participating in a broader marketplace of trading gear with others. After release, the Eleventh Hour team intends to release updates every few months in what they're calling "Cycles" that will include "end-game content, skills, unique items, gameplay systems, quality-of-life features, etc."
Back in 2019 PC Gamer called Last Epoch a great new action RPG. "Last Epoch's skill system is a brilliant evolution of Path of Exile’s labyrinthine web of upgrades and Diablo 3’s rune modifications," said Eric Watson, who also called out the music as a high point.
We checked back in with Last Epoch in 2023, when it showed off four years of updates at Gamescom alongside the runemaster, one of its 15 classes, after having launched multiplayer. At the time, Eleventh Hour CEO Judd Cobler talked about how much work it is to get ARPG-style multiplayer working.
"Creating multiplayer for one of these games is really really complex, because it's not just matchmaking, you drop into a match and [then] the match is over and then you dissipate, it's really drop-in, drop-out multiplayer that is persistent," said Cobler. "You go into towns and you see all these other players, and it's really—right below MMOs, it's about the most complex version of multiplayer that you can possibly create." The launch of Last Epoch multiplayer "has gone phenomenally well," he added.
You can find Last Epoch on Steam for $35. It will release its 1.0 version on February 21, 2024. Anyone who buys before the release date will get an exclusive cosmetic pet, if that's your kind of thing.
Last Epoch is developed by Eleventh Hour, a team of game developers who met on the r/gamedev subreddit in 2017 and formed up to create "the perfect ARPG." It was Kickstarted in 2018 and released to Steam Early Access in 2019 and has since sold over 800,000 copies.